Wellspring: The advance from Hinduism or Buddhism to Christianity: The advance from Beauty to Goodness

Tuesday, June 27, 2023

The advance from Hinduism or Buddhism to Christianity: The advance from Beauty to Goodness

Rudolf Steiner:

... the will is what accompanies us when we pass through the portal of death. When we die, the energy we have developed in our will accompanies us, along with its content of cosmic thoughts. And the new idea of the risen Christ — the One who lived, although his earthly body died — addresses our will. This new and powerful idea was no mere recollection of babyhood. It pointed in the other direction, toward death, and appealed to the element that accompanies human beings through the portal of death. Thus, the dawning of the Christ idea, the Christ impulse, is founded in human evolution. It was a necessity of human evolution.

This is an extremely important, even essential, truth. Consider what Hindus or Buddhists experience in perceiving, feeling, and thinking about the world of minerals, plants, and animals. They take all this with them through the portal of death to enrich the knowledge of the gods in the supersensible world. But what do Christians take through the portal of death? They take their experiences of social relationships and connections with other human beings — in other words, everything that we can experience only as human beings in the company of other human beings, through human fellowsip on Earth. We might say that Buddhists take Earth's beauty with them through the portal of death, while Christians take Earth's goodness. The contributions are complementary, but Christianity represents an advance over Buddhism in that it allows the heavenly worlds to understand earthly social circumstances.